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In Eastern Kentucky, Politics Extends a Bloody Legacy

In one of the bloodiest election seasons in more than 50 years in these fabled Kentucky hills, Sheriff Edd Jordan of Clay County is watching his back.

''When you're a sheriff in eastern Kentucky, you watch your back every day,'' Mr. Jordan said.

He prevailed at the polls on Tuesday and, more important, survived his patrols along switchback mountain roads, where more than a sniper or two lurked this season with his own deadly idea of politicking.

Kentuckians who thought they had lived down the old feudin'-and-a-fussin' stereotype are finding some of the back-road hamlets of the eastern hills flirting anew with their own blood-soaked 19th-century history, when furious political differences were regularly tested by ambush.

This year, with five months to go before the general election, two candidates in sheriff's races have been killed. Other races have been punctuated with gunfire and fistfights, and there are widespread accusations of swapping votes for liquor, cash and even the addictive prescription pain-killer OxyContin.

In one of the most shocking killings, the Pulaski County sheriff, Sam Catron, was gunned down in April as he left a festive political fish fry that drew hundreds of supporters. One of Mr. Catron's political challengers, Jeff Morris, was quickly arrested.

But the depth of die-hard partisanship in these hills was only underlined in the voting last Tuesday. Mr. Morris drew 123 votes, despite the charge against him, losing in the Republican primary to Todd Wood, endorsed by Sheriff Catron's widow.

A century ago these hills crackled with the feuds of Judge Jim Hargis, Marshal Jim Cockrill and other political patriarchs. Dozens of pistol-packing partisans were gunned down.

No one has been arrested in Harlan County in the killing of a former sheriff, Paul Browning Jr., who was found shot in the head and badly burned on a backwoods road last March as the primary season began.

In a way, Mr. Browning epitomized the bare-knuckle extremes of eastern Kentucky politics: he had run afoul of some enemy as he was trying for a political comeback after three years in prison for conspiring to have two public officials killed.

''You know our crime rate has been falling for years, and this is probably one of the safest places in the country to live,'' Sheriff Jordan of Clay County said. ''Unless you're a politician.''

Kentucky has slowly been shedding its stereotype as the battleground of hillbilly clans, an image played up in films and melodramatic newspaper accounts that entertained audiences into the 1930's, said Dr. Thomas H. Appleton, a historian at Eastern Kentucky University.

''People certainly get worked up about local politics, but this violence is quite unusual in the 30 years I've lived in Kentucky,'' Dr. Appleton said. ''The new violence certainly doesn't do anything to combat the lingering image of Kentucky as a lawless place.''

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Feuding in the Kentucky hills can be traced to ''a poisonous precedent,'' an 1806 gunfight over rustled cattle that deepened into sporadic combat between settlers along the Kentucky River, according to John Ed Pearce, a retired columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and author of ''Days of Darkness,'' a vivid Kentucky history.

Sheriff Jordan is investigating four shootings here before primary day. They include the riddling of County Clerk Jennings B. White's van with bullets and a shot into the home of his ultimately victorious challenger in the Republican primary, Freddy Thompson. There is also the case of a local private investigator, Bill Phillips, who opposed Mr. White's candidacy and was shot six times as he returned from Indiana with some negative campaign intelligence: a 34-year-old record of Mr. White's arrest on an assault charge, which was later dropped.

In the campaign, Sheriff Jordan shut down absentee balloting at the clerk's office twice after he found long lines of waiting voters, some of them getting into fistfights. Unusual numbers of absentee ballots were cast in advance in this season's most heated races. As in the past, the losing candidates suspected the surge in absentee voting was evidence of wholesale vote buying.

The rival camps in the clerk's race here contend that local spin doctors may have staged the shootings to evoke a kind of perverse nostalgia, and thus voter sympathy.

''No way in hell Jennings White comes out alive from a van hit 33 times by gunfire,'' said Danny Reid, a Thompson partisan. ''I'd like to know exactly what he was doing,'' Mr. Reid said, mocking Mr. White's story of crawling into the woods to save his life.

Mr. White's partisans, in turn, question whether Mr. Thompson staged the shooting into his home on the same night, even as they insist the shooting that blew out the car windows of a White supporter, Martin Lawson, was not staged.

After all this, Mr. Thompson, a hardware dealer and political newcomer who went door to door in the hollows, defeated Mr. White, the incumbent of 10 years, by a vote of 5,102 to 1,330 in what The Manchester Enterprise called a shocking upset.

''No hard feelings toward the man,'' Mr. Thompson said. ''It was just a real hot election with a lot of families getting carried away. Years and years ago politics used to be pretty bad, but, Lord have mercy, this job is not worth one scratch on anyone.''

Worth it or not, local offices have long inspired visceral competition in eastern Kentucky. One measure of the commonwealth's past and future in the results on Tuesday involved three other former sheriffs, besides the unfortunate Mr. Browning, who attempted comebacks.

In Breathitt County, former Sheriff Ray Clemens, who lost his job in a drug scandal, was rebuffed by voters. In Morgan County, former Sheriff Roger Benton, an ex-convict for having protected drug dealers, was also turned back.